Review: Software Defined Networking and OpenFlow

International Journal of Computer Applications, 2015

Today's data center complexity has been drastically increased with the widespread of many dynamic services. However, provisioning heterogeneous services to satisfy user's demand is a challenging task for the service providers and as well for the cloud Network administrators. Traditional network architectures were not designed to meet the requirements of today's enterprises and end users. Hence to meet the users demand and to address the difference between market requirements and network capabilities in data centers the industry has come up with the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) architecture and its related standards. With SDN, static network can advance into a wide range of service delivery platform capable of responding rapidly to changing business, end user's demand, and market needs. SDN provides a novel and innovative approach for controlling and managing virtual machines in data centers. In this paper, we discuss the concept of SDN, which can be implemented by the OpenFlow protocol. We discuss the OpenFlow architecture and its components with various OpenFlow versions. Finally we discuss OpenFlow based SDN implementation, testing and present an overview of SDN based applications.

Software Defined Networks (SDN) is an emerging new network paradigm which enables network programmability and breaks the network vertical integration by separating network intelligence from underlying network devices such as routers and switches. SDN promotes the logically centralized control to program the network. SDN decouples data plane and control plane of the network devices to simplify the network management and great innovation by network programmability, using OpenFlow as a communication protocol between SDN controller and network elements. This paper presents a comprehensive critical survey on SDN and OpenFlow. The main aim of this paper is to give a brief introduction of SDN, the basic architecture of SDN and to show the control plane and data plane separation. The building blocks of SDN as layers are provided with study of infrastructure, southbound, controllers, northbound and network applications. Later research challenges and distributed computing in SDN are discussed to provide future researcher's brief idea about the future scope in the field.

Software defined networks (SDN) are an emerging technology that is being increasingly adopted by various network operators. These technologies provide new services and powerful analytics that help to transform the network and unfasten its intelligence to serve today's business demands. This paper briefs about the need for change in the current networking technology and explores the role of Open Flow protocol that is used by researchers to experiment with more realistic settings to provide for a new network architecture. Further, this paper discusses the advantages offered by SDN and the huge potential of OpenFlow based SDN. As SDN can simplify management of virtualized networks, enable cloud computing and reduce costs, the vendors would be encouraged to adopt SDN and OpenFlow. The objective of this paper is to provide an insight into the latest technology to the vendors to assist them in future enhancement of their switch products in the network.

2017

Today’s network switches require reconfigurations from time to time, as they have data forwarding plane and control plane positioned together in same devices. This results in complex working of switches, with inefficient performance in terms of repeated functionality and delayed delivery. This system based on SDN gives an idea to separate packet forwarding functionality from control functionality from such devices which results in efficient network communication. OpenFlow is one of the SDN technique provides network architectural paradigm to networking. By decoupling the control plane from data plane, SDN can achieve repolicing. Using OpenFlow, a network administrator can modify the nature of network by writing simple software programs, which manipulate the logical map of network. This system elaborates use of an OpenFlow switch in network with various topologies having single, multiple switches.

M.Sc. Thesis, 2013

The traditional networking infrastructure is still static in nature due to its complexity, vendor dependence and QoS requirements. Software Defined Networking (SDN) is aimed at surpassing the limits of traditional networking infrastructure and making it a dynamic network. In SDN, for a single change in network, the network configurations are changed only at central or some specific controller(s) rather than touching individual network devices. One of the SDN protocols ‘OpenFlow’ is a normal application layer protocol, which is encapsulated inside TCP, IPv4 and Ethernet format. In this thesis, the integration and benefits of OpenFlow protocol in LAN environment have been analyzed. OpenFlow controller is the heart of the OpenFlow network, and in centralized hierarchy it poses a single point of failure and risk of DoS attacks. In an OpenFlow network, the switch fol-lows its flow table to make forwarding decisions and rejects its traditional forwarding table. The flows must be carefully configured, since a mismatch leads to packets being forwarded to OpenFlow controller that may decide to broadcast packets, and lead to a drastic reduced throughput from 941 Mbps to approx. 340 Kbps in Gigabit network. All the flows were manually configured and installed to switches via OpenFlow controller making the network again static in nature. In order to handle the dynamic network, an automation framework can be developed that adds or remove flows respec-tively. The flow concept can be interpreted as avoiding routers in a network, but in fact flows do not override the features of a router. The benefits of OpenFlow in LANs include an independent and programmable con-trol over the network. The conducted experiments have demonstrated its successful in-tegration inside a single subnet in LANs. However, a full integration with LANs could not be achieved due to the lack of support for layer 3 protocols and OpenFlow’s slow integration into hardware. In addition, the deployment models are not well-suited to the service providers. OpenFlow protocol is more suited to the data centers or backbone networks to handle growing data, and smaller networks like campus area networks to isolate the research traffic from the network traffic.

Proceedings of the International Conference on Advances in Information Communication Technology & Computing - AICTC '16, 2016

These days the usage of network is growing at a faster pace, at the same time a lot of challenges is facing by the network administrator, to tackle the frequent network access by the users. The network infrastructure is growing rapidly to meet the business need, but it requires re-policing and reconfiguration of the network. But managing the underlying infrastructure becomes more complicated to handle the unprecedented network demand. The Software Defined Network (SDN), is the next generation Internet technology, which not only solves the ossification of the Internet, but also creates innovations and simplifies the network management. The key idea behind SDN is separation of control plane from the data plane, as a result, devices in the data plane simple becomes the forwarding device and transfer all the decisionmaking activities in a centralized system called a controller. Among many, OpenFlow is the standard and most popular SDN protocol that interacts between controller and forwarding devices. In this article, we will give an overview of the basic architecture of SDN and OpenFlow, SDN-controller interaction and benefits of SDN. CCS Concepts •Computer systems organization → Distributed architectures; •Networks → Network Architectures ;

International Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, 2014

Although computer networks have spread worldwide, organizations that use networking technologies, have complained about the fact that no new feature has been added. Due to their newly emerged needs, they also prefer to automate many tasks. Moreover, they prefer their networks to be developed using software, rather than expensive and new hardware. Software-defined networking and Open Flow protocol separate data level from control level which makes the network smarter and more manageable. Network's main infrastructure is also separate from applications. This makes organizations to program, automate, and control networks more efficiently. In this paper we will introduce this technology by reviewing the literature.

— Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a new networking paradigm in network technologies in which the data plane and network plane are separated. This new technology began to be widely used in last few years and studies started to increase on this new technology. The communication scheme of the network consists mainly of the controller and programmable OpenFlow switches. The centralized controller can be considered as the brain of the network which is basically responsible on determining the path of the incoming packet by informing the switches to route that packet in the right direction. In this paper, a complete definition and description have been shown and a survey study on the SDN has been presented based on different types of studies have been already made historically. An overview on the simulators used to implement these networks has also been shown.

Computer Communication Review, 2008

This whitepaper proposes OpenFlow: a way for researchers to run experimental protocols in the networks they use every day. OpenFlow is based on an Ethernet switch, with an internal flow-table, and a standardized interface to add and remove flow entries. Our goal is to encourage networking vendors to add OpenFlow to their switch products for deployment in college campus backbones and wiring closets. We believe that OpenFlow is a pragmatic compromise: on one hand, it allows researchers to run experiments on heterogeneous switches in a uniform way at line-rate and with high port-density; while on the other hand, vendors do not need to expose the internal workings of their switches. In addition to allowing researchers to evaluate their ideas in real-world traffic settings, OpenFlow could serve as a useful campus component in proposed large-scale testbeds like GENI. Two buildings at Stanford University will soon run OpenFlow networks, using commercial Ethernet switches and routers. We will work to encourage deployment at other schools; and We encourage you to consider deploying OpenFlow in your university network too.

We explain the notion of software-defined networking (SDN), whose southbound interface may be implemented by the OpenFlow protocol. We describe the operation of OpenFlow and summarize the features of specification versions 1.0-1.4. We give an overview of existing SDN-based applications grouped by topic areas. Finally, we point out architectural design choices for SDN using OpenFlow and discuss their performance implications.